The coding community have greeted the rise of AI without quite the same concern that has impacted on other areas of work.
While some industries and sectors have already had to modify their working practices, and employees have found that their roles have changed or disappeared completely, coders have taken a somewhat different approach.
You see, coders are a pretty resilient bunch. What they work with is changing and evolving all the time so they are prepared to adapt their roles and improve with every development of the coding environments they work in.
There’s no doubt that AI will change the programming landscape. Some have said that it will decrease the need for entry-level programmers, which may be true, but others think that instead it will increase this group’s capacity and speed for working with AI developed coding languages.
There’s a widely held view that AI will create new opportunities for programmers, especially when overseeing or managing AI tools that they can integrate into their work.
AI tools for programmers
One such tool that developers at our client Eficode have been using is “Codepilot”. It’s a one-stop shop for developers hoping to make their coding practices more efficient, as well as search for solutions to coding queries and errors in a variety of languages. Powered by Github, Stack Overflow and Searchcode, it’s sprung out of a Y Combinator Startup School, and is becoming increasingly popular with coders and devs.
Photo by Florian Olivo on unsplash.
Another tool that developers might be more familiar with is also GitHub’s similarly named “Copilot”, which uses an OpenAi codex to suggest code and other important functions in real time. Having been trained on what it says is “billions of lines of code”, it turns natural language prompts into useful coding suggestions to enhance patterns across dozens of languages. It will also help solve queries and suggest improvements in order for developers to create better software outcomes.
How else can AI enhance coding?
We’ve already seen how AI can help explain complex code snippets or algorithms for developers, assist in debugging by providing solutions based on errors, and generating rudimentary code snippets to kickstart the coding process.
It’s also a good resource for learning new programming concepts, design patterns, languages, or frameworks, and for understanding API documentation.
Even by using ChatGPT, coders and developers have found how it can help streamline the documentation process, providing descriptions, comments, and generating basic documentation content. It’s also useful for interview preparation, offering coding interview questions, solutions, and communication tips.
For the AI tools we’ve mentioned, developers and coders will be confident that while it’s good for general guidance and high-level ideas, it doesn’t replace human judgment, especially when it comes to code quality and those very important security-related concerns.
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